Filed under: Tips and tricks, Terminal Tips
Terminal Tip: Finding by Time
Have you ever lost track of a file that you were just working on? Or were you ever curious about which files an installer has just added or modified? The command line find command offers a simple way to track down any files created or updated within the last few minutes. Its amin and cmin flags tells find to locate files that changed with a certain number of minutes, e.g. to search within 10 minutes: find / -cmin -10 or find /Users/ericasadun/ -amin -3. The - before the time says to find within the time period (with, say, the last three minutes) rather than to look for exact time matches (at 3 minutes ago exactly).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Duncan said 6:51PM on 4-27-2007
Better yet, you can touch a file (/usr/bin/touch, not the other kind) and then find anything newer than that.
For example, touch /tmp/beforeinstall
Then after the install has run, do find / -new /tmp/beforeinstall -print
Much simpler and has the ability to be more precise.
Of course, with .pkg files you can just use lsbom...
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